The HEPI Blog aims to make brief, incisive contributions to the higher education policy landscape. It is circulated to our subscribers and published online. We welcome guest submissions, which should follow our Instructions for Blog Authors. Submissions should be sent to our Blog Editor, Josh Freeman, at [email protected].
In the past 15 years, the Labour Party has backed the tripling of undergraduate fees in England (at the 2005 election), supported a big cut in fees (at the 2015 election) and is now backing the abolition of fees (from the 2017 election onwards). Meanwhile, the Conservative Party has shifted…
Last week HEPI wrote for the first time on the issue of university pensions, looking back at the history of the USS. As part of our commitment to welcoming debate, we invited UCU to respond to the report; you can read Matt Waddup’s blog here. One area highlighted by Matt in his…
There is a great deal of hope that the Government’s long-promised international education strategy will move the UK to a better place when it comes to educating people from other countries. I hope it does. Few other policy areas have so much positive evidence going for them. But writing and…
A Guest blog kindly contributed by Simon Marginson, Professor of Higher Education in the University of Oxford’s Department of Education and Director of the ESRC/OFSRE Centre for Global Higher Education. This blog has been taken from his response to the speaker (Chris Millward of the Office for Students) at a…
This guest blog responding to HEPI’s new report on university pensions has been kindly provided by Matt Waddup, the Head of Policy at the University and College Union. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going is the message that underpins Nick Hillman’s rags to riches story of the…
HEPI’s report The Invisible Problem? Improving Students Mental Health, by Poppy Brown, highlighted that despite students having access to strong social networks and better employment prospects, survey data repeatedly shows that student are on average less happy and more anxious than the general population, including other young people. As such…
The role of a think tank is – in large part – to make potentially dry subjects interesting, engaging and impactful. But just sometimes, our job is the opposite. It is to try and help temper subjects that have become so divisive that it is hard to make reasonable progress.…
Have we come to the end of a golden age of higher education? That suggestion set the tone at the first of this year’s HEPI / AdvanceHE’s parliamentary seminars: ‘Boom or bust? How can institutions – and the regulator – best respond to the new market pressures in higher education?’…
A guest blog by Dr Scott Kelly, who lecturers at New York University London. He is the author of ‘The Myth of Mr Butskell: The Politics of British Economic Policy 1950 – 55’ and of two HEPI reports, Reforming BTECs; Applied general qualifications as a route to Higher Education and Raising productivity…
This guest blog has been kindly written for HEPI by Gervas Huxley of Bristol University and Mike Peacey of the New College of the Humanities. Parents of undergraduates frequently express surprise at how little time their children spend in lectures and classes. On open days it is common for both pupils and their parents to ask for information on contact hours. It was concerns of this kind that led us to use the Freedom…